Hospitals, office buildings, grocery and department stores, shopping malls, gallerias and other large buildings typically have large open floor areas subject to heavy foot traffic. Typically, these areas are surfaced or covered in decorative terrazzo, vinyl, or other plastic or composite materials because of their long-wearing characteristics.
As should be appreciated, the heavy traffic using these facilities tends to track dirt and dust from outside the building all across the floor area. The need to clean the floor area is further compounded where food is served in the building. Soft drinks, ice cream, candy and other snack foods often drip or spill from containers being carried by busy workers or shoppers. Additionally, stocking clerks and customers handling, for example, foodstuffs in a grocery store, often break or spill the contents from containers thereby further complicating the problem. It should also be appreciated that the long wearing floor coverings are subject to scuff marks from, for example, hard soled shoes and shopping cart wheels. Thus, it is clear that frequent cleaning of these floor areas is desired at least once and preferably twice a week on a continuous basis.
As disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,369,540 to Burgoon et al., it is known in the art to provide a floor cleaning machine that may be ridden and steered by the operator in order to scrub and clean large floor areas. While the Burgoon riding machine provides an efficient and effective way to clean large floor areas in a small amount of time, it, however, should be recognized that the Burgoon machine is not without its disadvantages.
For example, the Burgoon machine does not provide any effective way to clean the floor bordering a wall or floor corners without damaging the wall or the machine. The scrubbing brushes on the Burgoon machine do not extend beyond the frame and/or body of the main riding unit. As a consequence, any attempt to clean the floor edges or corners leads to potential damaging contact between the body or frame of the riding unit and the adjacent walls. Further, even if larger brushes were added to the Burgoon cleaning machine so as to extend clearly beyond the frame or body of the riding unit, the brushes or pads and possibly even the rotating backing plate supporting the brushes or pads would make contact with the wall. This contact disadvantageously tends to create unsightly scuff marks along the wall baseboard.
Additional problems with the Burgoon floor cleaning machine and others known in the art relate to the ability of the machine to follow the contour of the floor and maintain the cleaning brushes or polishing pads in proper floor contact at all times for effective operation. When this is not done, streaking and unsightly dirty areas often result at "low" spots of the floor. Other important considerations that need to be addressed in designing an improved operator-ridden floor buffer include the provision of a simplified buffer head or deck assembly that may be quickly and easily adjusted and repaired while also providing excellent operating efficiency. This last consideration is particularly important when it is realized that floor cleaning machines of this type are typically electrically driven through battery power.